Stop feeling guilty when your kids have nothing to do
“I’m bored”, I have nothing to do”, “What can I do now?”—it’s the rant from kids we parents dread, especially during weekends and holidays. We do everything in our power to not let that happen: after-school classes, playdates, holiday camps, etc.
If kids are busy, they won’t be bored. That’s the mantra most parents live by.
Dealing with boredom is not just a problem for kids. Studies show that boredom levels rise through childhood, decline through late teen and early adult years, rise again beyond the sixties.
How do we deal with boredom? Easy, pick up your screen.
Boredom and tech guilt
Scrolling through your social media feeds, binge-watching shows, playing video games, technology has given us enough solutions to not get bored.
Shouldn’t this solve the problem of boredom forever? Somehow, the problem of getting bored is becoming worse.
As soon as we put the screen down (after binge-watching the entire series or after playing Roblox for 4 hours 😱), we don’t feel satisfied. It’s unlike the satisfaction we get from a long run, a game of tennis, a playground session in case of kids.
A kid back from the playground is physically tired and happy. A kid back from a long screen-time session is mentally tired and cranky. Real-life feels dull.
In our minds, we know that nothing meaningful has been done.
We experience what they call the Tech guilt—feeling bad about spending so much time with tech products and achieving nothing meaningful.
Alright, spending time on devices to kill boredom is a bad idea. How about keeping kids busy in other planned activities? What’s wrong with that?
Instructions versus innovation
As kids keep moving from one structured activity to another, they are losing the ability to do anything beyond following instructions.
This culture of keeping busy, following instructions evolved during the Industrial Age. The assembly line work mostly meant repetitive, low-skilled jobs.
Do what you’re told and do it for long hours worked well for factories.
But in today’s world, the mantra isn’t do as you’re told but innovate💡. In that sense, the Information age that we are living in today has more in common with the Renaissance period than the Industrial Age.
More than 500 years ago, when Michelangelo started work on the challenging statue of David, rumors began that he was making very little progress. It was said that he stared at the marble for hours and hours, doing nothing. When a friend questioned him, he responded, “Sto lavorando” (Italian for “I’m working”). And working he was, indeed. The 25-year old, ignored block of marble became the great statue of David.
Michelangelo’s friend and painter Giorgio Vasari wrote, “Men of genius sometimes accomplish most when they work the least.”
There are so many examples of brilliant ideas coming to people while they are doing nothing much…Archimedes in this bath, Newton in his garden, Ramanujan in his dreams. Even the wise minds of our time follow this philosophy. Bill Gates takes time to meditate 2–3 times a week. Yuval Noah Harari takes a 2-month retreat every year from a busy life.
Non-busy time is not just for geniuses
Companies like Pixar, 3M, Google, Facebook, Twitter recognize the relation between non-busy time and creativity. They have a disconnected time for their employees. In this time, they want their employees to become not busy, self-aware, even work on side projects. Gmail, google maps, AdSense were all born from this time.
As the big companies have discovered, keeping people busy keeps creativity away.
It’s the doing-nothing time when our subconscious thought process kicks in. Experts call it the incubation period. It’s the time when we are less constrained by conventional ways and more open to generating novel ideas, making new connections. That’s how letting go of a complex problem for some time or sleeping on it helps.
It feels like you just came up with the solution. The truth is that when you are taking a shower, enjoying a long walk…when you think you are doing nothing, your subconscious is hard at work.
Doing nothing is the most productive time for creative work.
The same holds true for children.
“A bored child is preparing for something he is unaware of”
— Adam Phillips
The problem is that a threshold needs to be crossed before the subconscious thought process kicks in. Before that happens, we give up and make them busy.
By keeping them busy, we are taking away from them their creativity. We are taking away their time and space of unconscious thoughts, making new connections, learning new things of their interest, building things…who knows what all are they capable of!
Stop feeling guilty when your kids have nothing to do. An essential life skill we need to teach our kids (and ourselves) is doing nothing.
